3 July 2009
Luanda — The Angolan minister of Territory Administration, Virgílio Fontes Pereira, Thursday in Luanda ruled out the possibility of removing the members of the traditional authority, by the Angolan government, due to the lack of legal support.
Speaking during a Thursday's parliamentary session, presided over by the acting Speaker of the National Assembly, João Lourenço, Fontes Pereira stated that "the government has no institutional responsibility with regard to filling a position of traditional authority".
"The filling of this post is carried out under the traditional practices and customs and not based on the institutional intervention of the government, which can not be a problem of its responsibility", stressed the minister.
To Virgílio Fontes Pereira, the law does not grant the entity that in the executive has the competence to appoint or remove local administration officials, specifically the Territory Administration minister, also the competence to move any representative of the traditional authority.
Answering the concern raised by an MP of opposition UNITA party, the minister admitted the possibility that, through the Lusaka Protocol, a member of the traditional authority may have been appointed to hold public post, such as municipal, communal administrator or assistant administrator, and, for "the reason of the expiry" (of the mentioned protocol), the referred person might have been dismissed.
Fontes Pereira was part of the government team, led by Prime Minister António Paulo Kassoma, who attended the National Assembly meeting, convened for the approval of the reviewed draft of State's Budget and National Plan for 2009.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 Angola Press Agency. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
